Myth Busted

This morning I got up late after a little run in with insomnia last night. Nothing like a good game of Peggle at 2 am. I decided to hit Caribou for my morning caffeine fix so I headed out in baggy sweatpants, loafers, my hair covered with a cap, bleary eyed and unshaven. Of course I ran into a local businessman that I’ve been trying to snag as a client. I’m sure I’ve been written off as a total goofball. But I guess that’s obvious no matter whether I’m buffed and polished or looking like I slept under a bridge.

So the dime off the drink trivia question was “True or false, Lemmings commit mass suicide?” Well of course it’s true, why do you think they call them Lemmings. But the young whippersnapper behind the counter, the manager of the establishment, informed me that I was wrong. I expressed doubt and said that I’d have to look it up. He started rummaging around under the counter apparently for the corporate trivia question guide and I felt the burn of the collective stink-eye focused on me by the dozen people waiting in line for their morning fixes. I think if I had a smart phone and pulled it out to google it and prove him wrong I would have been brutally beaten by the caffeine deprived mob. “Dude, it’s OK, I believe you, really.”

But of course I didn’t. So as soon as I got home I googled it and found out that yes in fact it’s a myth that lemmings, when there population explodes go nuts and stampede over cliffs into the ocean. I also found out that they don’t fall from the sky either, which was a great relief.

This realization, beyond my regret of losing a dime, is causing a strange dissonance. Once I thought that you could say, “Lemmings literally commit mass suicide by stampeding over cliffs into the ocean.” And you could say that followers of Jim Jones or [your favorite political leader to hate] were metaphorically lemmings. Now it seemed in a metaphorical sense, lemmings literally are not lemmings. This is literally a metaphorical mobius strip. I believe that if too many people start thinking about this the universe might implode.

You know what I wish? I wish that boxelder bugs would commit mass suicide due to overpopulation.